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The Tech's Special Issue On Student Stress Is The Best Data Journalism You Will Read This Year | MIT Center for Civic Media

Chris Peterson

Research Affiliate, Center for Civic Media

Chris Peterson works, teaches, and researches at MIT. He works at the intersection of digital strategy, new media, and social change.

In addition to his research affiliation with Civic, he is on the Board of the National Coalition Against Censorship, a Fellow at the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution, and the founder, owner, and sole-proprietor of BurgerMap.org.

He earned his B.A. in Critical Legal Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he completed his thesis on Facebook privacy and/as contextual integrity advised by Ethan Katsh and Alan Gaitenby. He earned his S.M. in Comparative Media Studies from MIT, where he completed his thesis on user-generated censorship advised by Ian Condry, Ethan Zuckerman, and Nancy Baym.

The Tech's Special Issue On Student Stress Is The Best Data Journalism You Will Read This Year

As my Civic bio says, in a former life I directed web communications for MITAdmissions. A big part of my job was running the blogs. While many colleges now have student blogs, the MITAdmissions blogs, founded by Ben Jones, are famous for being honest, uncensored avenues of student expression.

On October 29th, a junior named Lydia wrote an blog called "Meltdown," in which she wrote a heartrending account of what it's like to be a stressed out MIT student.

I don’t think many people understand what we mean when we say that MIT is hard. It’s not just the workload.

There’s this feeling that no matter how hard you work, you can always be better, and as long as you can be better, you’re not good enough. You’re a slacker, you’re stupid, and MIT keeps an overflowing warehouse of proof in the second basement of building 36. There’s stress and there’s shame and there’s insecurity. Sometimes there’s hope. Sometimes there’s happiness. Sometimes there’s overwhelming loneliness.

Reading it broke my heart. I've known Lydia for a long time. I read her application to MIT. I hired her to be a blogger. I've talked with her before about how difficult MIT - and life - can be. Her blog post made me cry.

I was not the only person deeply affected by Lydia's post. It spread, first through MIT students, then alumni, and then the broader world. The traffic to her post almost took down our servers. Lydia was interviewed on WBUR and WCVB. MIT President Rafael Reif addressed the post in a letter to the MIT community, urging "every member of the MIT community — faculty, students, staff and alumni — to read Lydia’s words and try to imagine how we might respond, as individuals, as groups within the Institute and as an institution overall."

MIT has struggled for years - maybe decades - with the perception and reality of student stress. There is a culture of intensity at the Institute which opposes the fragility of humanity, a tension Lydia articulates when she tells the Tech that "I’m not just an academic machine — as much as I’d like to be. I’m still a human being that needs a break." The inhuman, inhumane hardness of MIT is simultaneously one of the best and worst things about the place. As one Media Lab grad student tweeted yesterday, "Pre-MIT I suspect I evaluated in terms of "inherent" aptitude. Now, persistence and perseverance…[survival is] a survival skill, right?"

But the current conversation - triggered by Lydia, addressed by Reif, now continued by the Tech - gives me hope. In her interview, Lydia says she was "emailed by S3 [Student Support Services] on Nov. 16, and they said that in the past week alone the office had had three times the number of walk-ins that they did last year…Some people have emailed me, commented, or came up to me and said, “I wasn’t going to go S3, but now I think I will."

This is the best student journalism - any journalism - can do. Identify an apparent but underdeveloped problem in the community. Explore and contextualize it through data, through interviews, through advocacy. Create not only a space for conversation, but help clarify and define the frame of the conversation itself. I could not be prouder of Lydia, Joanna, the Tech, and the MIT community for the work that they've done. Their efforts deserve recognition, praise, and awards.